The Blackrock Foundry will be the second raid available at release. It is the center of the Iron Horde and has 10 bosses in three wings, with a non linear layout.

The feel of looking down in BRD or UBRS and seeing more of the area was nice.

You will still be able to raid with similar flexibility in boss order as Flex has now.

The new Normal will be as difficult as Flex is today.

The new Heroic will be as difficult as Normal is today.

The new Mythic will be as difficult was Heroic is today.

All levels of difficulty except for Mythic will be cross realm on release.

Each raid difficulty has its own lockout. They will be loot based lockouts, allowing you to kill the same boss multiple times per week and only get loot once a week.

There is no more dynamic difficulty switching in raids. Now you have Mythic trash and Mythic trash loot.

Raid Finder will be the only kind of raid you queue for now. Normal (current Flex) will require you to zone in.

Loot will scale based on the number of players, giving you a higher chance for another piece of loot the more players you have. This ensures there are no optimal breakpoints that would limit raid size to get more loot.

Right now boss abilities still have some breakpoints. Going from 14 to 15 adds a third target for a certain mechanic in SoO right now, but in the future it would have a scaling random chance to have a third target so that there isn't that breakpoint.

Quests

Quest chains that are important and have important lore and story will be indicated with an icon.

There will be more optional content and less quest hubs that have to be unlocked by another chain first.

The dynamic events from Timeless Isle will appear in the world when you are leveling and Level 100. Right now they are mostly soloable rare spawns, but the WoD events will be more complex and not soloable.

Treasures will be hidden down paths that quests don't send you down and found frequently. They also will have a small amount of story to go with them.

Quests will have a chance to give you rare or epic rewards.

The quest UI has been updated to combine the map and quest log and help guide the quest experience better.

The map will show you where you left off on the important storyline quests.

The world will be more dynamic and less predictable.

Level 100 Content

There will be few or no daily quests at level 100!

There will be more max level content than ever before.

People really liked the Patch 5.1 daily quest story line, as well as the Timeless Isle reward system. These will be combined to create big zones with long progressive story lines that are more free form.

There will be some environmental gameplay, similar to Troves. It gives you an opportunity to use your class skills that are normally not used to earn rewards.

Garrisons

When you build your Garrison, you will get a few starting buildings.

The Town Hall is your main point of interaction and is automatically placed.

All profession buildings are in the Small Buildings category. They will allow you to use an engineer follower to run missions to get engineering recipes and items.

The pet stable will have a trainer you can fight.

Large buildings are something you would expect to see in a WC3 base. Each building has a bonus. For example, the barracks will let you have more followers.

Buildings start out small and are upgraded over time.

Some upgrades can be purchased, but some are blueprints that you find in the world. They can be faction rewards, quest rewards, random world drops, or found in other ways.

Specializations allow you to customize a max level building. They can be changed once each day and may have a cost. You pick from one of three specializations.

Some buildings will allow you to assign followers to them. If you find a miner follower, he can work while you are offline collecting ore.

Managing your followers will be an important part of garrisons.

Fill plots to upgrade your tier. Plots come in multiple sizes.

Followers can be sent on Quests, Scenarios, Dungeons, or Raids. Raids may take party of a week and many followers.

You put the followers into a party and send them on missions. You get a bonus if you match traits on your followers to the missions.

When you send your follower somewhere in your Garrison, you will see the follower there.

Systems

World of Warcraft is a game you play with friends. WoD will remove barriers that stop you from playing with friends and encourage you to make new friends.

Random matchmaking is going to feel like a last resort.

Raid Finder is there to let you see the content and story, almost like a Tourist mode.

Group Finder will work cross realm and work for many different types of groups. Finishing Shadowmorune, RBGs, Raids and more!

Stacking the Deck will give you bonus Valor for queuing with friends or queuing again with the same random matchmade group. (~10% bonus Valor)

Leveling

Leveling doesn't feel as exciting as it used to, so WoD will try to address that.

From level 91 to 100 you will get upgrades to your core spells. Some will be slight class changes, some will be passive bonuses, similar to old spell ranks. Some of the boosts will definitely be easy to feel.

See the slides for examples of leveling rewards!

Itemization

Getting new items should be exciting. Right now it feels like you have to do a lot of work when you get a new item.

Hit and Expertise don't feel like a bonus, so they are now gone!

Dodge and Parry, gone!

Reforging, gone!

Enchanting is still around, but fewer items can be enchanted. There will be more enchant choices for those items.

The number of items with gem sockets will be gone. Only one gem slot per item. Gems are more powerful. Sockets are a bonus that don't count towards item level budget. No more socket bonuses or meta gems.

The stats on armor will now change based on your spec. Plate drops and it will have whatever stats your class needs, no more Intellect plate! No more PvP Priest Healing set and PvP Priest DPS set, just a Priest set.

Jewelery, cloak, trinkets, and weapons will be more role focused and might keep stats.

Armor will become a good tanking stat again, Spirit will be good for healers.

Tertiary stats are bonus stats that can appear on gear that don't count towards the item level budget. Lifesteal, avoidance, sturdiness, movement speed (stacks with other bonuses), cleave, and more.

Item squish is in! All of the big jumps from old expansions and raid tiers will be flattened.

Your relative power won't change, just the numbers. The speed at which you kill things won't change. You can still solo old content.

Q&A

Connected realms will make it possible to find a Mythic group on realms that are currently low population.

The transition to 20 player Mythic raiding will be difficult, but it will be good for tuning and the game as a whole.

Scaling raids to 30 is a possibility, but isn't planned right now.

Scaling player level is being worked on still. When the team comes up with a good way to scale and reward old content there will be more to talk about.

Followers do content that is unique to Garrisons, not anything that players can do.

Ok i just had to make an account just to comment on this. Yes! Yes! From what I can see from the layout, I think I already like the new raid layout. I love big multi-wing instances where there is more than just a straight hallway through the whole thing. Finally.

Excited for everything I've seen so far, except the borking out of accuracy stats. "They aren't fun," is incredibly lame. If they're not fun, dont stack any. Leave things like theorycrafting and min/maxing to those of us for whom it *is* fun. I mean, whats left, stack pewpew OMGBIGNUMBERS stats like an FPS. OK, so I'm the guy who LIKED playing a paladin tank back in early BC. +DEF, +SPELL, +SBLOCK, +DODGE, +PARRY, +STAM, +MP5... The day I found a macro to do the number crunching for uncrushable was like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one.

But yeah, borking out accuracy stats is so kiddie. Dont make this as simple as a dudebro game, please?

The dynamic events and treasures from Timeless Isle will appear in the world when you are leveling and Level 100. Right now they are mostly soloable rare spawns, but the WoD events will be more complex and not soloable.

As long as the chance of getting epics from that are (VERY) low, then I'd be OK with this. No epics from this would be a plus, but I'm sure that's far outside the realm of possibility, tho.

Off-topic, is there any word on whether heroic 5-mans in this coming xpac will require a zone-in, as few as they are?

Deal. Back in the day, all top-end raiding was 40 man, then 25 man. 10 man is too limiting on class balance. They've had to homogenize the classes so much so that 10 man guilds didnt whine about not having every buff in the book. "WE WANNA TAKE FOUR DK's, BUT WE DONT HAVE STAM OR BLOODLUST!! QQQQQQQ"

I really think Blizzard should make a Lead Role-Playing Designer for WoW. Just so they have someone to add the tiny bits of of details to the world to make it more alive. Weather it be to the way the npc's act, the way you can interact with the world and adding new dimensions to game systems (like say when recruit for a guild you can carry a billboard in your chest like the cataclysm prepatch twillight's hammer, and you can just click on the guy walking to sign the charter).

I really think this is the most solid advice I can give to the WoW team. The game needs to be very fun, alive and immersive, and the story characters with more certainty than drama. Integrity is what a game needs to get people to play it.

A little sad about no dailies (super minority lol)...as a reputation whore I'm curious if we'll simply have to resort to grinding kills for reps now.

Well tbh I'd rather grind mobs than do dailies for rep. If you miss dailies you miss out on rep. If it's grinding mobs everyone can do it at their own pace. The hardcore players can go and spend a weekend and get exhalted while the casual players can kill a couple every day and keep the same pace that dailies had. Seriously, screw rep bound to daily quests.